Jozef Straka was a staunch and aggressive opponent of parochial schools. As an official in the administration of post-war Slovakia, he was instrumental in carrying out the state's seizure of church-run schools and establishment of a state monopoly of education. Jozef Straka was a Roman Catholic priest. Laco Novomeský was a defender of religious education. As Slovakia's commissioner of education, he insisted that every student in Slovakia have access to catechism classes, taught by a clergyman from his or her denomination, in the public schools. Laco Novomeský was a leading communist. A close examination of immediate post-Second World War Slovakia will not only make it clear why we find such counter-intuitive positions but also enable us to look at one of the crucial issues of conflict – education – between two major ideological and institutional forces in twentieth-century Europe – communism and Catholicism – in a time and place that is especially propitious for considering such issues.

At the end of the Second World War, Slovakia, independent since March 1939, rejoined the Czech lands to reconstitute the Czechoslovak Republic.Footnote ¹ A combination of factors made Slovakia an especially significant venue for examining the interaction between Catholics and communists. First, both Catholicism and communism enjoyed strong positions there. Slovakia was traditionally heavily Catholic, and the Catholic Church held a central place socially and culturally for many Slovaks.Footnote ² Moreover, Slovakia's leading political party during the inter-war period and dominant party during the war was explicitly Catholic and headed by a priest.Footnote ³ The communists, while never as strong politically as Catholics, saw their stock rise due to their key role in the Slovak resistance and the successful defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Red Army, and emerged from the war as a powerful and rising movement. Communist–Catholic relations took on an importance in Slovakia that we find in few other places, becoming central to a host of issues, including land reform, the treatment of ethnic minorities, trials of alleged war criminals and anti-state conspirators, and, of course, education. Second, Czechoslovakia, including Slovakia, enjoyed a degree of political and cultural pluralism unmatched in east central Europe at this time, and was unique in the absence of any occupation armies since late 1945, when US and Soviet forces left the country. In other words, the fierce contest described below – between an assertive communist-dominated bureaucracy and a self-confident church – occurred before Czechoslovakia had become a communist state.

As the war came to a close, the wartime Slovak Republic, in which the Catholic Church had a privileged role, collapsed along with its ally Nazi Germany, and a so-called people's democratic regime was set up in the reconstituted Czechoslovak Republic, a regime in which the Communist Party would play a vital role. Slovakia came out of the war with a considerable degree of political autonomy, possessing its own administrative and legislative organs and free to make policy in a number of realms.Footnote ⁴ The government's Košice Programme, proclaimed in newly liberated territory in eastern Slovakia in April 1945, promised among other things that Slovaks would be ‘masters in their Slovak land’ and that their relations with Czechs would be as ‘equal with equal’.Footnote ⁵ Only two political parties were permitted in Slovakia at the start – the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunistická strana Slovenska, KSS) and the Democratic Party (Demokratická strana, DS). With the outlawing of Slovakia's leading inter-war and dominant wartime party, the Slovak People's Party (Hlinková slovenská l'udová strana, HSL'S), Slovakia's Catholics lost the option of voting for an avowedly Catholic party, and instead were forced to choose between the atheistic KSS and the Lutheran-dominated DS. The new regime sought to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church and clergy over life and politics in Slovakia. At the same time, however, both the KSS and the DS wanted support from the Catholic population and were to a greater or lesser degree reluctant to risk alienating that population through actions perceived as anti-Catholic. It was in this context that one of the most problematic issues of relations between the Church,Footnote ⁶ the Communist Party, and the Democratic Party played itself out – the establishment of a state monopoly of education.Footnote ⁷

This article will briefly discuss the issue in the contexts of the inter-war period, the wartime state, and the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, introducing the dilemmas facing the Church, the KSS and the DS after the war with respect to education policy, and examining some of the differences in conception between Catholics and communists that underlay much of the conflict. Then it will examine three developments central to the issue – the initial conflicts between Church and regime over the nationalisation of education in spring and summer 1945; the so-called April Agreement, when the DS cut a deal with Catholics in advance of the parliamentary elections of May 1946; and the debates over the new school law in 1947. The article will conclude with an assessment of the Catholic, communist and DS positions in the conflict over educational policy in post-war Czechoslovakia up to the communist takeover of February 1948.

Background

Relations between the Catholic Church and the First Czechoslovak Republic were troubled in many ways. The angry mob of Czech nationalists smashing the statue of the Virgin Mary on Old Town Square in Prague shortly after the state declared its independence in 1918, the initial (albeit unsuccessful) attempts to separate church and state, the promotion of a Czechoslovak National Church as an alternative to the Roman Catholic Church, the secularising and sometimes anti-Catholic influence of Czech officials working in Slovakia, the elimination of some traditional Catholic holidays and the institution of a holiday commemorating the proto-Protestant Czech martyr Jan Hus, which prompted the papal nuncio to leave Prague for Rome – all point to a less than smooth relationship.Footnote ⁸ In terms of education, the nationalisation of Catholic gymnasia in Slovakia particularly aggrieved the Church.Footnote ⁹

When Hitler's intervention in east central European affairs helped lead to the establishment of a separate Slovak Republic in 1939, Catholicism assumed a privileged role in education under a regime led by the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, in whose social and political life Catholic clergy were highly engaged. Fr Tiso became both president of the new republic and leader of the state's ruling party. Catholic clergy were heavily engaged in politics, government and administration. Bishop Ján Vojtaššák, along with two Catholic priests, belonged to the eighteen-member State Council, and approximately one-fifth of parliamentary representatives were priests, as was the mayor of the capital city, Bratislava. Catholic clergy were active in the HSL'S at all levels. Two of its six county organisations were headed by priests, as were sixteen of its sixty district organisations. Dozens of priests served as functionaries at the lower level. Given the fact that this was the only party permitted for Slovaks, Catholic clergy had a significant role in managing Slovakia.Footnote ¹⁰

Compared with the inter-war period, the influence of the Catholic Church on education increased considerably under the Tiso regime. Priests held teaching positions at all levels, and basic education became overwhelmingly parochial, either Catholic or Lutheran. The government restored crucifixes to the walls of schoolrooms and religious instruction to the curriculum in all schools, thereby departing from practice under the inter-war regime. Students were required to attend services on Sundays, and teachers were forbidden to belong to anti-religious organisations. The sciences and the humanities were taught from a theistic perspective, and coeducation was eliminated in the high schools.Footnote ¹¹

The Church's privileged position in education was targeted by opponents of the wartime republic who preferred, among other things, a return to the educational policies of inter-war Czechoslovakia. When an assortment of communists, Lutherans, Catholics and other Slovaks disgruntled with the Tiso regime rose up in late summer 1944 in the Slovak National Uprising, one of the measures taken by the leaders of the revolt was to nationalise all schools, from kindergarten to college, and make all teachers state employees. This decree by the Slovak National Council (Slovenská národná rada, SNR) of 6 September 1944, supported by both communists and the DS and bitterly opposed by the Catholic Church, became the basis for educational policy once Slovakia was liberated from Nazi occupation.

Post-war dilemmas

After the war the Catholic Church in Slovakia was in an unenviable position in many ways. It was operating in a political context that lacked, for the first time since 1919, an explicitly Catholic Slovak political party. The two existing parties – the KSS and the DS – were dominated by atheists and Lutherans respectively. Things were no better for Slovak Catholics on the Czechoslovak scale. Three of the four Czech parties had anti-clerical traditions (the Communists, the Social Democrats and the National Socialists); only the Czech People's Party could be counted on to defend Catholic interests, and even it was traditionally leery of politically engaged Catholicism in Slovakia and its past association with anti-Czech Slovak nationalism.Footnote ¹² Adding to the Catholic Church's problems was the fact that it had benefited from the wartime regime, which was now broadly condemned by Czechoslovakia's new leaders as nothing more than a pro-Nazi puppet state. The shadow of Jozef Tiso hung over post-war Slovakia. His arrest by US forces in June 1945 in US-occupied Germany, repatriation to Czechoslovakia and execution two years later drew attention to the troubled immediate past in ways that brought discomfort to Slovakia's bishops. Compounding the situation was the pro-Tiso underground, which formed localised conspiratorial groups, issued newsletters and leaflets, and posted pro-Tiso, anti-Czech, anti-communist, anti-Jewish slogans on public spaces under cover of night.Footnote ¹³ Although none of the bishops supported the underground, and indeed consistently disavowed it, the underground's identification with Catholicism and the fact that some priests supported it at local level meant that any underground activity could be used by the Church's opponents to raise questions about its loyalty.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus the Catholic Church was in the difficult position of having to defend its interests against a regime aimed at substantially reducing its social, cultural and political role, while not raising suspicions that it was disloyal to the new order and hence inviting intensified repression. Education was one of the fields in which the Church needed to walk a fine line.

Slovakia's communists faced dilemmas of their own with respect to the Church and education. They were steadfast supporters of the complete nationalisation of education while at the same time not wanting to alienate Catholics or provoke a backlash from them. The DS was caught even more tightly by the needs of the situation. Like the communists, it supported the nationalisation of education, a legacy of the Slovak National Uprising. After the war, however, it realised that if it wanted to win the parliamentary elections, it needed to court the Catholic vote, something that would be difficult to do given its opposition to parochial education. The DS was in a particular fix – if it reached out to Catholics on the education issue, the communists would accuse it of abandoning the principles of the Slovak National Uprising, a charge that, if it stuck, could render the DS guilty of disloyalty and unfit to participate in political life; if it did not reach out, it might have to forfeit the support from Catholics that could give it a significant electoral edge over the communists.

Conceptual differences

In the debate over education, both supporters and opponents of the nationalisation of education held different and conflicting understandings of the relevant terms and concepts.Footnote ¹⁵ For the Church, religious freedom meant, among other things, the freedom to establish schools and the freedom for parents to send their children to schools operated in accordance with their religious beliefs. For the state, religious freedom was defined far more narrowly – the freedom to affiliate oneself with whatever religious confession one wished and the freedom to worship and engage in other purely religious activity.

Regarding the social role of the Church, the state took a similar narrow construction – the churches were to be concerned about the spiritual needs of their flocks while leaving everything else to the state. Churches were to keep out of politics, and to the extent that they had a role in public life, they were to follow the lead of the state in social, cultural and economic matters. The churches were to follow and co-operate, not lead, in state-sponsored reconstruction work, mobilising Christians on behalf of the state's objectives when needed. The Catholic Church saw things quite differently. Catholic social teaching, especially since the time of Pope Leo XIII's seminal 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, taught that the Church had not only the right but also the obligation to address social, cultural, economic and political matters. Moreover, a series of popes, including the incumbent Pius XII, had asserted the Church's right to found and operate schools for the education of Catholics.

Another contested concept was democracy. In the Church's view, democracy meant that the will of the people, not an unelected committee, should decide state policy toward education. In the view of the state authorities, on the other hand, democracy by definition included the principle of separation of church and state, whether the population agreed or not. For the communists in particular, the people's will was expressed not through elections but through communist-dominated social organisations purporting to represent war veterans, workers, peasants and others. Thus, if these groups opposed church schools, they were being ‘democratic’, even if the large majority of the population disagreed.

Finally, both sides differed over their understanding of what it meant to be anti-state. The authorities defined it very broadly, meaning anything that opposed the programme of Czechoslovakia's people's democratic regime. This meant that, technically, opposing the nationalisation of education qualified as an anti-state activity, given that a state monopoly of education was deemed to be an essential part of the regime. The Church, on the other hand, believed that to be anti-state one had to be working against the regime itself, not simply opposing a government policy and working to change it from within the system.

Initial conflicts over the nationalisation of education, spring and summer 1945

Over the course of 1945, the Slovak National Council issued a number of decrees that laid out the specifics of the state monopolisation of education it had decreed in September 1944. Education officials received instructions to have implemented nationalisation by the beginning of the academic year 1945–6, which meant that by that autumn, Slovakia's educational system was almost completely in the hands of the state. Slovakia's Catholic hierarchy was unhappy with this policy, and protested against it right from the start.Footnote ¹⁶ Although in autumn 1944 the Uprising's commissioner of education and leading DS member Jozef Lettrich gave assurances that the churches would be consulted in the nationalisation process, by spring 1945 nationalisation was under way with little regard for the churches’ views, under a commission of education now led by the communist Novomesky.Footnote ¹⁷

On 23 May 1945, Slovakia's Council of Bishops sent a protest memorandum to the presidium of the SNR signed by its chairman Bishop Karol Kmet'ko.Footnote ¹⁸ Kmet'ko presented a number of arguments against nationalisation. First, he argued that the regime was violating its own professed principles of religious freedom by depriving the Church of its right to maintain schools. Second, he asserted that the Church had both a right and a duty to found schools, and that the Church's past exercise of this right in Slovakia had helped to make the Slovaks into a ‘cultured and civilised nation’. If anything, ‘parochial schools should be preserved and supported out of gratitude’, Kmet'ko argued. He noted that parochial schools were consistent with religious freedom, and that even France, with its long tradition of secular education, was again reinstituting parochial schools. Kmet'ko also pointed to the Church's understanding of the rights of society, which the nationalisation was violating. He asserted the standard Catholic position that parents ‘have a natural and indisputable right to educate their children and to determine the direction along which this education takes place when they entrust their children to the schools for the long term’. Moreover, the nationalisation was carried out in a most undemocratic manner, according to the bishops. The SNR, an unelected body, simply decreed it. Given that Slovakia had a rich tradition of parochial education, Kmet'ko doubted that such a nationalisation policy could have passed an elected representative body. In the bishops’ view, the nationalisation was not a pressing need, like food supply or transport. In countering charges by supporters of nationalisation that parochial education was divisive, Kmet'ko argued that what really caused a rift in society was the state's refusal to respect religious difference. In any case, given extensive state regulation of curricula, teacher certification and textbooks, Catholic schools had little chance of fomenting ‘harmful’ ideas. The bishops lamented that the state opted to launch a Kulturkampf rather than accept the Church's eagerness to co-operate in the reconstruction of Slovakia.

The state paid little heed to the bishops’ objections, however, and the next step in defence of Catholic education provoked a forceful crackdown.Footnote ¹⁹ In late May, Bishop Andrej Škrábik wrote to Kmet'ko urging that bishops organise petitions against the nationalisation of schools.Footnote ²⁰ Although Škrábik had proposed that the drive be presented as something instigated by lay Catholics, it began on 8 July with the reading of a pastoral letter by Slovakia's bishops in churches across Slovakia.Footnote ²¹ Every parish was to assemble believers and explain to them the situation with respect to education, and encourage them to sign resolutions urging that the decree on nationalisation not be implemented.Footnote ²² These resolutions would be sent to the episcopal chancellery and then passed on en masse to the SNR.

The state's response to the petitions was immediate. Police searched the offices of Kmet'ko and those of other bishops, as well as parishes, seminaries and monasteries.Footnote ²³ They interrogated clergy and seized the draft of a pastoral letter which concerned justice in post-war Slovakia. It complained of ‘people's courts’ set up to deal with alleged collaborators, citing the hurried convictions, condemnations despite absence of evidence and denunciations used for personal revenge. At the same time, the draft spoke favourably of Slovaks who had served their nation loyally, including under the Tiso regime. To the letter's author, imprisoning such Slovaks after the war was analogous to punishing the captain of a ship for attaching his boat to another ship in an effort to keep it from sinking. The letter compared the common practice of denouncing enemies as collaborators for personal revenge as a terrible sin for which one would have to answer to God. It concluded by calling on Catholics to stand together and be proud of their faith. This was precisely the sort of document the communists were looking for. Footnote ²⁴

Apart from searches and seizures, communists mobilised the professional and social organisations they dominated – such as the Union of Educational and Cultural Workers, or local factory councils – to condemn the petition drive.Footnote ²⁵ They called an extraordinary meeting of the Slovak National Front for July 16, where senior leaders of the KSS and DS issued a ‘Proclamation on the Misuse of Religion for Politically Subversive Actions’.Footnote ²⁶ The proclamation said little about nationalising schools, but attacked Church involvement in politics and portrayed the petition drive as the thin wedge of an effort by Catholic reactionaries to revive the Slovak People's Party. The draft pastoral letter came in handy for this allegation, as did a confiscated letter (in Latin) that stated, ‘It is necessary to work with all means in order that a third political party be established.’Footnote ²⁷ These documents supposedly proved that ‘several highly positioned church dignitaries do not hesitate to misuse their position to try to justify fascist criminals . . . they do not hesitate to misuse their position to justify a politics of fascist Ludak separatism . . . they do not hesitate to misuse their position to try to terrorise the people's courts, who have their mandate from the orphans and widows and sacrifices of the martyrs of our national struggle.’Footnote ²⁸ The proclamation also repudiated Catholic claims of repression, noting that the fact that catechism classes were allowed in the state schools indicated that the rights and freedoms of religious believers were not being violated.

The Church did not leave these attacks unanswered. Within three days Kmet'ko issued a public reply, speaking in the name of the Slovak Council of Bishops.Footnote ²⁹ He placed the onus for the breakdown of relations on the state, and pointed out that the state had reneged on its earlier promises to consult the Church when implementing the nationalisation decree, and that it had never replied to his memorandum of 23 May on the issue. He reiterated the usual Catholic arguments in defence of parochial education, citing canon law, a papal encyclical and the presence of parochial education in places as disparate as Belgium, Holland, China, India and even France and Soviet-occupied Poland. Kmet'ko denied that the petition drive was anti-state, or even political, but rather the exercise ‘of the most elementary right of every person, the right of petition and appeal’. For exercising this right the Church was made the target of searches, seizures and a hostile press campaign. Kmet'ko went on to argue that the allegedly compromising documents found in his office in no way bore the interpretation the authorities tried to place on them. The draft pastoral letter was no more than one of a number of proposals normally submitted to church leaders, and the bishops had in fact rejected it in favour of a less controversial draft. Hopes to found a Catholic political party were not unusual, for leading Slovak, and Czechoslovak, statesmen had made similar calls.Footnote ³⁰ Kmet'ko reminded the Slovak National Front that the Church had already greeted the renewed Czechoslovak Republic with ‘sincere joy’, and expressed willingness to co-operate with the new regime, assuming that its rights would be respected.

The fronts between Church and state were not entirely clear, however: in their campaign against parochial education communists employed sympathetic clergy. Most prominent in a small circle of pro-communist priests was Jozef Straka, a veteran of the Slovak National Uprising, who tried in summer 1945 to interest the KSS in developing its co-operation with ‘progressive clergy’.Footnote ³¹ As head of the religious affairs department in the communist-led Commission of Education,Footnote ³² Straka was an energetic advocate of the state takeover of Catholic schools. Slovakia's bishops, although they considered excommunicating him as early as May 1945, decided to exercise caution, fearing that attempts to discipline or silence him could bring communist wrath down upon the Church.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, DS election campaign leaflets referred to him as a ‘red priest’ for his efforts to secularise Slovakia's education system.Footnote ³⁴

Several observations are in order with respect to the petition drive and other early conflicts connected with the nationalisation of education. First, up to this point, the conflict was between the Catholic hierarchy on the one hand and the state authorities, who in Slovakia consisted of both communists and Democrats, on the other. Although the communists pushed harder for nationalisation than the DS, both supported it. Second, the regime would tolerate memoranda of grievances from the bishops, but not church-organised manifestations of public dissent. Third, in an effort to avoid alienating Catholic voters, the KSS made use of sympathetic Catholic clergy, even giving them prominence in the communist campaign against parochial education, as the example of Straka illustrates. Fourth, the communists made sure that the DS participated in any statements and actions in defence of the nationalisation decree. The KSS, for example, insisted that the DS take part in the Proclamation on the Misuse of Religion ‘in order that this not be an action of the KSS alone’, as the party's general secretary Štefan Bašt'ovanský told the KSS Broad Presidium on 13 July 1945.Footnote ³⁵ Fifth, the DS, while obliged to support nationalisation as a heritage of the Slovak National Uprising, needed to find a way to distinguish its position from the KSS if it wanted to attract Catholic voters. Events over the next ten months gave it an opportunity to do this.

The DS reaches out to Catholics

The DS, although supporting the nationalisation of schools right from the start, tried to position itself in a way that would reach out to Catholics. The DS held its party congress on 8 July, the very same day that the Catholic bishops launched their petition drive. The document outlining the party's programmatic principles offered little to Catholics. It reiterated that education should be state-run, and that religious institutions should enjoy state protection and support, but only in carrying out their appropriate functions, which did not include political activity. It also tepidly defended religious freedom and the need for religion as part of national education.Footnote ³⁶ More solicitous of Catholic concerns was the speech given at the congress by chairman Ján Ursíny, who strained to affirm that the DS was a party for all Christians, not just Lutherans. He addressed a number of concerns of Catholics, including education:

By referring negatively to the religious policy of Czechoslovakia's First Republic, which was one of the aggravating factors leading to the rise of Slovak nationalism among Catholics gathered round the HSL'S, Ursíny was clearly trying to attract Catholic support.

But there was only so much the DS could do to reach out to Catholics, given the context of the time and the parameters within which the party had to operate. When the Catholic bishops launched their petition campaign on the day of Ursíny's remarks, and the KSS insisted that the DS join them in a proclamation against the so-called clerical abuse of politics, the DS had little choice but to step back temporarily from its efforts to win over Catholics. Nevertheless, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Catholic vote mattered to the DS.

In wanting to reach out to Catholics over the issue of education, the DS faced a problem. Were it to repudiate nationalised education, the communists would question its commitment to the principles of the Slovak National Uprising, which was tantamount to being labelled anti-state and could threaten the right of the DS to exist. Another problem was that the communists, in an effort not to alienate religious believers – the vast majority of Slovaks – were favouring the inclusion of catechism classes in the state education curriculum. The DS needed to outflank the communists on this issue without taking the dangerous step of calling for parochial schools. Along these lines, in early 1946 some DS members began advocating education permeated by a Christian world view, in other words, religious education across the curriculum, not limited to a weekly hour of catechism class.Footnote ³⁸

As Catholics in late 1945 and early 1946 took steps towards founding their own political party, an initiative that received the tacit backing of Slovak communists as it was sure to deprive the DS of votes, the DS decided to cut a deal with leading Catholic activists in Slovakia. The result was the so-called April Agreement of 31 March 1946, according to which Catholics were appointed to leading positions in the DS, and were guaranteed sizeable representation among the DS contingent in parliament and in the Slovak National Council, as well as positions in party organs and party-run institutions.Footnote ³⁹ The promised ratios ran from 2:1 to 7:3 in favour of Catholics. Regarding education, the statement read, ‘the party leadership holds the view that the party's line agrees with the views of the Christian churches, above all the Catholic Church, and that the DS will pursue this position if necessary with regard to the present political situation’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The April Agreement vastly increased Catholic support for the DS. In electoral propaganda, the DS played up its Christian worldview and commitment to issues of concern to Catholics. For instance, a DS leaflet presented the communists as desiring a militantly atheistic education, and accused them of removing prayers and religiously rooted salutations (such as ‘Pochválen’ and ‘S Bohom’) from the schools.Footnote ⁴¹ The Catholic bishops, while not endorsing the DS directly, issued directives through the Catholic press for Catholic voters to elect candidates who ‘will defend the freedom and rights of the Church, especially her right to schools’, among other things.Footnote ⁴²

Although the elections of 26 May turned out to be a smashing success for the DS, the party immediately found itself in an unenviable position in their aftermath.Footnote ⁴³ The KSS now began to target those Catholic activists in the DS who had benefited from the April Agreement, charging that they were crypto-fascists (Ludaks) working in the interests of the Tiso regime, and condemning the DS for harbouring such traitors. The KSS attacked the April Agreement as a pact between DS leaders and Catholic fascists and tried to discredit the DS by pressing its leaders to sign a joint proclamation of 26 June defending the government's programme (which included nationalised education) and condemning ‘the misuse of religious conviction for political goals and the breaking up of the nation into hostile religious camps’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Communist leaders and the communist press immediately began calling for investigations into the allegedly troubled security situation in Slovakia and purges of unreliable elements (which meant, for the most part, leading pro-DS Catholics). From this point on, communist pressure against the DS over its alliance with Catholics progressively intensified.

An important dimension to these manoeuvrings was the dissatisfaction of DS members themselves with the April Agreement, meaning that the party faced pressure from within against too ready an accommodation to Catholic wishes. The group in the party representing Democrats loyal to the wartime Partisan movement was particularly unhappy with what they regarded as an increase of ‘Ludak’ influence in the DS flowing from the April Agreement. This provided the KSS with an opportunity to foment conflict within the DS. For example, the Slovak communists hoped that the joint proclamation of 26 June would lead to co-operation between ‘progressive Democrats’ and communists.Footnote ⁴⁵ Communists pursued this line of attack from the May 1946 elections to the communist takeover of the Republic in February 1948.

The debates over the draft of the new school law

In March 1947 a parliamentary committee completed a draft law on education which was publicly debated through the summer. The Catholic bishops, the communists and the DS all tried to shape public opinion on the law.

The Catholic Educational Council (Katolícka školská rada), founded by the bishops to deal with school-related issues and under the direction of Bishop Jozef Čársky, asked all parish offices and Catholic organisations to pass resolutions against the state's monopoly on education and forward them to the Czechoslovak ministry of education.Footnote ⁴⁶ The resolutions were to request the return of all nationalised Catholic schools and dormitories, the right of the Church to found more schools, state support for parochial education where needed, a rejection of pedagogical innovation, obligatory religious instruction in all schools and an end to what the Council called ‘the politicisation of education’.Footnote ⁴⁷ On 2 May the Council launched an attack on the draft, noting that nationalisation of schools involved appropriating Church property that had been received from private donations.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, by impeding the Church's right to pursue its religious, social and cultural goals, the government was also infringing the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms.Footnote ⁴⁹ A few weeks later the bishops issued a pastoral letter emphasising that Catholic schools strengthened morality among youth and brought healthy competition into the education system.Footnote ⁵⁰ The bishops instructed Catholics that they were conscience-bound to work within the law to defend Catholic schools; they asked that believers urge their parliamentary representatives to oppose the law as drafted. Katolícke noviny, the weekly newspaper affiliated with Slovakia's Catholic bishops, likewise took up the cause in a series of articles authored by the eloquent and zealous defender of Catholic interests, the columnist Fr Jur Koza-Matejov.Footnote ⁵¹ Koza argued that it was no great consolation that catechism was available in state schools, as it was not obligatory, was taught when students were tired or hungry and was a mere expedient destined to be eliminated once communist control was consolidated.

Koza exemplified the low road taken in polemics between Catholics and their opponents. He recounted tales of teachers ridiculing students for questioning the theory of evolution and teaching them that their parents had them not out of love but self-interest, and, in one case from Hungary, of a male teacher at a state school requiring his female middle-school students to strip naked in physical education class.Footnote ⁵² When the communist weekly Nové slovo replied to Koza by citing the case of a Catholic priest caught in sexual indiscretions with a girl in her early teens, Koza pointed out that the said priest was violating the teaching of the Catholic Church, while the teacher in Hungary was implementing the policy of the state.Footnote ⁵³

Communists defended the draft as staunchly as Catholics opposed it. In particular they took up questions of teacher welfare and the quality of science education. Their chief education expert, Ondrej Pavlík, argued that confessional schools exposed teachers to pressure from non-specialists pursuing narrow sectarian interests and damaged the quality of education by distorting or restricting certain scholarly ideas in a medieval, obscurantist spirit.Footnote ⁵⁴ As the draft law came under public discussion, the KSS energetically fought for its acceptance. At its 13 May meeting the party's central committee made the law's passage a priority and mobilised communist-influenced organisations, including the Union of Educational and Cultural Workers.Footnote ⁵⁵ The communist press continued to emphasise that the law benefited nearly everyone – teachers, the Slovak population and even the Catholic Church itself; it gave teachers a level of pay, security and freedom unavailable at parochial schools, as well as freeing Slovakia's Catholic population from the burden of supporting confessional schools.Footnote ⁵⁶ Catholic priests, too, would be freed from the burden of having to worry about parish schools, and could rest assured that Catholic students were receiving catechetical instruction at the state schools.Footnote ⁵⁷ The communist press also noted that Bishop Čársky's campaign against the draft law was not finding as enthusiastic a popular response as the bishops had hoped.Footnote ⁵⁸ Perhaps most significantly, the communists reminded readers that nationalisation of schools belonged to the Košice Programme, to which all of Slovakia's (and Czechoslovakia's) political parties had committed themselves when the Republic was re-established in April 1945, and that it was the DS's chairman, Lettrich, who instituted nationalised education in Slovakia when he was commissioner of education during the Slovak National Uprising.Footnote ⁵⁹

The communists’ three-pronged approach – blaming the DS for the policy of nationalised education, attacking the Democrats for any deviation from that policy, and ensuring that no parochial schools could emerge in Slovakia – put the DS in a serious jam. Catholics were increasingly discontented with the DS by early 1947, both because it had failed, and miserably so, to prevent the execution of Slovakia's wartime leader Jozef Tiso, and because promises of more positions for Catholics in the DS had not been fulfilled.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this context the DS began to assert itself more in defence of parochial schools. At the 19 May meeting of its presidium, the DS resolved unanimously to oppose the state monopoly over education and support parochial education.Footnote ⁶¹Nove prúdy, the weekly journal where prominent DS members published on Slovakia's political, cultural and economic life, ran articles opposing the draft law. The articles cited papal teachings against compulsory secular education, as well as criticising rifts between teachers and religious believing parents caused by the state monopoly on education.Footnote ⁶² While Democrats were not coming out with thundering attacks on the proposed law, they were pushing their expressions of dissatisfaction with state educational policy farther than ever before. This in turn prompted communists to accuse the party of catering to its ‘Ludak wing’.Footnote ⁶³

When the Czechoslovak government found itself unable to agree over the draft law on education, it set up a commission whose task it was to hammer out an acceptable compromise. This too, proved impossible, however, and after a fruitless summer the commission failed to meet during the autumn.Footnote ⁶⁴ While the communists were hoping for a speedy passage of the law, it faced enough opposition that a final resolution of the issue was put off. For the non-communists, the hope was that the question could be delayed, perhaps until after the next parliamentary elections, when they expected to emerge with a stronger position. In fact, the law on education did not come about until after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, when no political opposition could stand in the way of communist desires in this or any other realm.

Conclusion

In the conflicts over the future of education in post-war Slovakia, in particular the question of nationalisation, Catholics, communists and Democrats played central roles. The Catholic Church consistently opposed the state's elimination of parochial education. The state's complete opposition to any attempts by the Church to mobilise the population on behalf of this issue limited the choice of tactics for Catholics. Bishops’ memoranda, pastoral letters and petitions, as well as press polemics, constituted the basic Catholic methods. The authorities, however, were happy to ignore the bishops’ complaints, and cracked down on any attempts by the bishops to involve the broader public in activism on behalf of parochial schools. Moreover, communists were able to employ sympathetic Catholic clergy, such as Straka, to serve as defenders and even implementers of policies counter to the Church's interests. The most productive action taken by Catholics was the April Agreement, which in turn placed much of the burden of defending Catholic educational interests on to the DS.

The communists resolutely and aggressively promoted the state monopoly of education, though they also tried not to alienate Catholics.Footnote ⁶⁵ This entailed supporting optional catechism classes in the state schools, as well as arguing that nationalised education in fact benefited Catholics. Their overall approach was to resist the Church on the issue, assure Catholics that communists constituted no threat to religion and use the education issue to squeeze the DS between its Catholic constituency and its commitments to the basic programme of the Slovak National Uprising and people's democratic regime. In addition, the communists hoped to sow discord within the DS between those Democrats who supported Catholic interests and those who opposed them. The communists sought to thwart DS attempts effectively to use parochial education as an issue, reminding voters that it was the DS itself that helped to bring nationalised education to Slovakia, insisting that Democrats sign up to communist-inspired attacks on church involvement in politics and condemning any deviation from the government's programme as an indication of Ludak influence in the DS.

The DS was in a most unenviable position on the education issue, as with so much else in post-war Slovakia. On the one hand, it wanted to reach out to Catholics, whose votes would make it the dominant party, electorally speaking, in Slovakia. On the other hand, it was constrained by the legacy of the Slovak National Uprising, a legacy it could not repudiate, or even slightly deviate from, without giving the communists cause to call into question its commitment to the Republic's social and political values and its right even to participate in the new government. The April Agreement, while giving the DS the votes it needed to win the parliamentary elections in Slovakia, bound the party to a Catholic constituency without unbinding it from its Uprising legacy. While both that legacy and that constituency were essential for the DS to succeed in Slovakia's politics (the one giving it legitimacy, the other giving it votes), this placed the party on a trajectory whereby it could only disappoint Catholics, while at the same time exposing itself to charges of abandoning its legacy. Education was one issue that helped bring this dilemma out into the open.

A few things are often overlooked in evaluations of relations between Catholics and communists in general that an investigation into immediate post-war Slovakia helps bring to light. First, we often forget that communist policy toward the Church was not one-sidedly heavy-handed, at least in its early stages. Events such as the highly publicised persecution of churchmen such as Alojz Stepinac in Yugoslavia, Jozsef Mindszenty in Hungary and Josef Beran in Czechoslovakia tend to obscure communist efforts to win over Catholics to their cause, or at least assure them that they had little to fear from communism. In this light, communists partnered their efforts to close down parochial schools with the enlistment of priests in their propaganda, an insistence on preserving opportunities for religious education in state-run schools, and arguments that made the secularisation of education seem like a boon and not a bane to the Church. Second, while we are aware of numerous cases where the Church failed to constrain clergy on the radical right for their collaboration with fascists and Nazis,Footnote ⁶⁶ we tend to forget that there was sometimes a similar reluctance to constrain clergy who collaborated with the radical left. Even in a multi-party state like Czechoslovakia, where the Soviet army was not present and where a party allied with Catholics won 62 per cent of Slovakia's vote, the bishops were afraid to intervene against Catholic priests who openly and enthusiastically co-operated with the communists. At a time when Catholics and communists, representing two of the strongest forces in society and with fundamentally antithetical views of the world, vied for a voice in deciding Slovakia's future, the battle lines were a little less starkly drawn than one might expect.